By Invitation-Only

Jan 28-29, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA

THE BUSINESS OF DISRUPTING UNEMPLOYMENT AND

CREATE MEANINGFUL WORK FOR EVERYONE

5 Billion Customers Want A Good Job

5B people are of working age. 3B want a job. 1.3B have one. 13% are engaged. Almost nobody has a job that fits them. Humanity creates a $75T world economy, running at a fraction of its capacity. If everybody had a job that fitted them, everyone would be much happier and humanity would be creating many times more value than today.

Tailored jobs for everyone on planet earth is becoming possible for the first time with high smartphone penetration and new infrastructures like cloud computing and big data analytics. We are at the beginning of a revolution in strengths finding, education, matchmaking, HR and the creation of opportunities in a long-tail labor market.

There is probably a >$100T market for innovations that help 5B people get jobs they love, capitalizing on their unique skills, talents and passions, matching people in great teams doing meaningful work.

Innovation for Jobs: earn by helping others earn better in more meaningful ways.

At the i4j ECO Summit, entrepreneurs, funders, educators, policymakers and other leaders from the innovation-for-jobs ecosystem will be talking shop around the business of disrupting unemployment.

Advisory Board

Sponsors

i4j Sponsors and Partners

Tracks

ANALYZING THE ECOSYSTEM:

The Ecosystem Graph Project (i4j Graph) is an i4j community project for mapping and analyzing the innovation for jobs ecosystem. It is a community tool for pinpointing players and ideas, how they matter and how they connect, for spotting trends and indicators. This workshop covers all aspects of i4j Graph, from aims to technologies, and is an opportunity for innovators and organizations to gain clarity of where they stand in the ecosystem connect.

DISRUPTING EDUCATION:

Venture and equity financing for ed tech companies soared to nearly $1.87 billion in 2014 year, up 55 percent from the year before. Traditional college education is being targeted by aggressive startups, aiming to deliver higher employability for a lower price. We will be looking at market trends for edtech, discuss new opportunities for education to be a driver for driving the future of work, and how that translates into business opportunities for edtech innovators.

EMERGING ECONOMIES:

Emerging markets are vast stores of underutilized human capacity and potential consumers who are in the process of being connected to a global marketplace For the first time, a global middle class is developing with unparalleled access to education and knowledge. Yet emerging markets are weighed down by poverty and unrest due to disparities in opportunity. Uneven access to education and wifi can deepen the chasm between rich and poor. A quarter of the world population have smartphones today, and it’s spreading rapidly as wifi is widely seen as a pathway out of poverty but many are getting lost in blind alleys as they try to find their way. The smartphone is a personal tool and a marketplace for buying and selling, and for trading work and services. Smart design of applications can unleash vast amounts of value creation by increasing the size, depth and breadth of the global marketplace. In this workshop we will be looking at pathways to prosperity, examples, trends, spotting opportunities for unleashing the global human potential for value creation.

JOB MATCHING: TALENT AND OPPORTUNITY:

Finding the perfect job is like finding the needle in the haystack. It’s not only about finding meaningful things to do for a good pay, it’s also about finding a good match with other people. It is very complex. Now we have the tools. Last year, i4j thought leaders sketched ‘Jobly’, the ultimate job matcher, and economics and policy to go with it, a blueprint of a future society where everyone will have a meaningful job tailored to fit their strengths. McKinsey recently presented a report along the same lines, suggesting that the market for job matching is eleven trillion dollars. Rework America, run by the Markle Foundation, is also looking at how an economy can look like where technology raises the value of human capital. In this workshop we will look closer at the future of job matching. Is Match.com the next Monster.com?

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THE DISCIPLINE OF INNOVATION:

We have an innovation issue. Not a job issue. We can become as innovative in creating good jobs as we are in developing innovative products and services. How do we go about innovating meaningful work for everyone? How can we create a strong middle class innovative economy? What would it take for business, policy, and education leaders to work together to make it happen? The innovation economy is not only possible but sustainable. In this workshop we discuss Innovation is a discipline that can be applied to just about anything. What are the main rules of the discipline and how is it applied to innovation for jobs, based on the well-founded experience of innovation for products and services?

PASSION

Traditional wisdom tells us to follow the market in order to earn a living. We discuss ‘marketable skills’, ‘employability’ and so on. And still, Steve Jobs never believe in market research, and everybody loves the stories about people who followed their passion, ‘did it their way’ and succeeded. With new technology, better matching mechanisms, new ways of approaching the labor market, might following your passion be gaining a competitive advantage?

HEALTHCARE AND BENEFITS:

In the US until the recent Affordable Care Act was confirmed, healthcare has primarily been a benefit tied to employment. With among world’s highest costs for healthcare per capita, the US has to bend the cost curve very very substantially both for the economy as a whole and for individuals so that better outcomes are achieved at lower costs. What are the pathways to prosperity for people and communities which involve health service delivery and achieving overall better health outcomes?

How large is the market for personalized, preventive healthcare, and how does it affect the economy and the labor market?

THE ON-DEMAND ECONOMY: GIGS AND SHARING:

If people earn their living through numerous gigs, will that make them secure to raise a family in the long run? This workshop will hopefully provide insights and alternatives to an economy that is based on employment.

ECOSYSTEMS:

In the networked innovation economy, companies reach out beyond their walls to connect to the right people. It’s very difficult to put the whole team under the same roof. Ecosystems are seeping into the organization charts. The mechanistic line organizations are encountering the organic ‘performance ecosystems’. The performance ecosystem comes with a new perspective on jobs and the labor market. Employment is not the only forms of engagement. This workshop will go over performance ecosystems that assist companies to help people get meaningful work and the relations between people who work and the organizations that hire them.

BUSINESS IDEAS AND MODELS FOR MEANINGFUL WORK:

Venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and participants exchange creative ideas about how a venture backed startup economy can disrupt today’s labor market dysfunctions. We will be discussing where to find the best opportunities and how to approach them.

MAN AND MACHINE: TECHNOLOGY DISRUPTING JOBS:

This conference is about ‘disrupting unemployment’. Is this a realistic notion? This is not the first time we have feared automation of all work. Each time some have said ‘it won’t happen this time, either’. Each time some say ‘this time it is different’. Is this the time it will be different and all jobs will go away? This is the i4j ‘Terminator’ workshop, for a deeper existential discussion about the future of work and man vs. machine.

PUBLIC POLICY AND GOVERNMENT:

The US spends in the order of $100 Billion each year on supporting people who can’t find jobs. How can government support innovation that disrupts unemployment? This workshop intends to bridge that long-standing gap between innovation policy and labor policy as both desire to increase the workforce to eliminate unemployment, using very different approaches, having challenges blending. How can innovation policy measure the success of innovative entrepreneurship in sustainable improvement in job creation, inclusion and job satisfaction? How can labor policy measure success of job creation in improving economic growth and fiscal balance? How can they mix?

STORYTELLING:

A Common Language for Disrupting Unemployment

Markets for innovation and people’s need for good jobs are different worlds of storytelling. Business, education, and policy media have different jargons. Labor and innovation economists publish in different journals and go to different conferences. Newsrooms have had the same silos as the rest of society, journalists who write about the labor market don’t write about innovation, and the other way around. Journalism has been keeping innovation and jobs issues apart. Sharing language across stakeholder groups will bridge silos. What kind of storytelling is constructive, and what can be the market for it? What is the future of journalism, communication, fiction writing, games and entertainment in the innovation for jobs economy?